Cop 3 Introduction Notes

CoP Practice: Animating

Once the backgrounds were sorted it was just a matter of drawing up the foregrounds and putting in motion tweens for everything. Not much to talk about the animating part to be honest. The foreground objects I have made blurry to give more attention to the backgrounds which I worked on A LOT!

Once I have animated everything it was just a matter of dragging the timeline around to synch it with the music. Originally I have made the second to last scene and the last as one. But when I showed it to Mike he suggested to separate them so as to clarify what the products were and then making the one child look like it just came off the production line. So as I applied that the animation seemed done and I was really happy with the way it turned out:

CoP Practice: Background Design

Finally started working on the actual animation. So first of I started with essentially the same background sketch I did in the previous blog post, figuring out perspective in out doors was the difficult part. For some reason understanding perspective is a lot easier in doors than out doors, probably because indoors you see objects in certain context and you can align some objects to the presictive lines of walls, ceilling or floor. This was a nice chance to recap on my knowledge of drawing.This brought me back to arts school where I attempted to draw 3 stories of my schools hallway with alms fisheye perspective. When I finally got the hang of when the lines are supposed to bend and when they are straight I understood how perspective works a lot better:

So when I recapped on this I figured vectors are perfect for this job because you can draw and bend lines really quickly and make everything really neat. The first background I did was this one;

The perspective here was not that difficult so it did not take long to make. I animated the smoke as well, To give it more depth Ive put up a few pipes in the foreground so they would move out of the way when camera pans into the view. Then I carried on making the next one:

This one seemed a bit dull and needed something to happen while the camera was panning through the view so I figure to put through a few poles passing by to give it yet again an impression of depth, especially when things unclose move quicker than the ones very far away, like when you're on a train and the things unclose flash by so quickly it's impossible to focus on them, whereas the mountain in the distance moves very slowly. As I wanted it to be synchronise with the music I made the poles pass by as with the beat of the music. Then I moved on making the establishing shot of the factory:

This did not demand of lot of brain work just a bit more detail than the other ones, because I felt this shot was important, and it needed to grab your attention a bit more. Then logically I would establish the environment inside the factory. this is where I wanted to change up the colour and make it red/black to make it look a bit evil. Because in a way that is how I feel about schools. Not that they are villain type of evil. Just the kind that tries to make you something you might not necessarily want to be. This is where the perspective got tricky. So I started of with the perspective point and dragging a bunch of lines from it.

After neating the lines up a bit I started giving them a bit more angles and thickness.

Then adding details and boom:

As for the lighting I decided to light it from the floor up to give it this oozing lava feel, or rather hinting that there's something going on down there but you can't see i yet. Also it sort of ampliphiet this evil feel I was going for.

I did the next background with applying the same logic, but the pace of the animation needed something animated in it so in the foreground I thought puttin moving gears would liven it up a bit as well as giving it a mechanised factory feel.

Then it was the tricky part of showing the factory making a product but not yet revealing what exactly it is. I did not want blur the only moving thing the view because either the view has to be super detail so the it takes the attention off the moving blurry thing or not use blur but be very careful with what show. So I tried to use silhouettes and hide them slightly behind the production lines being in perspective from the view below.  So I start doff with two perspective points:

The drawing in the vertices:

I used crossed lines from one corner to establish the middle of a square shape, so those line would be correctly positioned.

COP visual response: Idea generation

As soon as my essay was finished I started generating ideas for the visual response part of COP. To  be honest I had this idea since I have started the essay and I sort of stuck with it because I feel it was the best way to amplify my essay. In one part of my essay I mentioned how school resemble factories:
"First of all, the whole educational system is built to cater the needs of industrialism which makes it greatly out of date today. It seems to render kids in batches, sorting them by age and academic abilities. Even the schools structure resembles a factory- ringing bells, broken down into certain subjects and therefore separate facilities."
So I decided to build from there. After the tutorial with Richard he thought it would be an interesting idea to picture schools as grim factories producing children, so I figured to take more of a visual approach than a narrative. I was considering to follow a narrative of one particular student who questions the way the factory works and what he is supposed to do when hes outside. But I figured it would not make as much of an impact as a more visual animation. By visual animation I mean create a series of backgrounds and pan through them slowly revealing what the animation is about and using music to add to the environment. I started off with search for music that would help with mood of the animation and would set the one for it. As I browsed through various different libraries, one song kept popping into my head and I figured to listen to it a couple of time and see if it gave me any ideas.

After listening to the song I decided to buil my animation around, the music inspired a lot of visuals for me and I started drawing sketches.

CoP practice: Idea generation part 2

After I thought of what specifically what I wanted to do for practice part of the essay I looked into some art work for inspiration. I was looking for artwork featuring factories and preferably black and white. Stylistically wanted to got for a pretty simple tone based background design, mainly with grey and red colours. So I made a mood board:

After I went through the mood board I made a sketch to try our an idea I had of making environments using only tones:

And then did a quick colour test:

Also made a few sketches for the animation itself:

As soon as I edited the music I figured there was no real need for an animatic because it would be synchronised with the music anyway and it would be the camera panning through various backgrounds, so i decided to to just get on with making the backgrounds.

Ken Robinson Ted Talks Notes and Ideas for animation

For my essay research I have looked into educationalist Ken Robinson, and I found that he has done quite a few Ted talks which as perfect for me since I am a better listener than reader. 

I went through all of his talks and what I wrote down a few notes and ideas both for the essay and practical part of CoP. He was talking about how the process of education is linear and not as organic as it should be. I child should be educated through trial and error not through dry information from text book with no context whatsoever as to why it is relevant to their lives. This idea of education being mechanical and linear gave me some visual ideas which I am going to use for my practice part of CoP. Comparing schools to factories and how they standardise children. In school there is no individuality or room for uniqueness, same as factory made products, children are rendered in batches sorting them by age. The schools structure resembles a factor as well, ringing bells, sectors decided in separate fascility.

Proposal Writing

CoP3: Proposal Writing (lecture notes)

Recently we had a lecture about how to propose a research question for CoP3. Since my hand written notes are far more fabulous than my typed up ones could ever be, I'm just going to leave these here: